security cameras

have you guys noticed that all the security camera footage on news are freakingly low quality!
(in US)
why bother with such low resolution ! u cant even tell if the person is a male or female!
technology and storage is so cheap...
WTH 

..probably so not too many people feel uncomfortable about the rapidly growing numbers of cameras (that are VERY high quality pictures)...

Jakob E.

The picture are probably tiny sections of a larger image blown up many times.

The big lie on TV shows is how they can enhance pictures to extract fine detail.

JR

..no, imo the big lie on TV is how low quality they are. Public would probably not feel comfortable if they realized.

;D

Jakob E.

In Sweden most security cameras in public places are just awful… filming the incident with a cell phone camera would be at least twice as good.

The police can ask for a permit to use a 30-day camera surveillance over a precise area and those cameras are very high definition… but the permit is pain to get.

In Sweden there is also a very high concern for the use of security cameras in public places. The debate is all about integrity.  ???


Best regards

/John

From outer space no less they can see the mole on your shoulder blade.

another factor is the memory space required to store all those pixels of a high resolution image.  For some applications, motion sensors can shut of the recording if nothing is happening.

JR

micaddict said:

From outer space no less they can see the mole on your shoulder blade.

Click to expand...

Close to anyway

kambo said:

have you guys noticed that all the security camera footage on news are freakingly low quality!
(in US)
why bother with such low resolution ! u cant even tell if the person is a male or female!
technology and storage is so cheap...

Click to expand...

Why bother with such low resolution? Because while "technology and storage is so cheap," the VGA-quality cameras are cheaper than HD cameras, and the customer will almost always choose based on price.

kambo said:

have you guys noticed that all the security camera footage on news are freakingly low quality!
(in US)
why bother with such low resolution ! u cant even tell if the person is a male or female!
technology and storage is so cheap...
WTH 

Click to expand...

If you ask a politician about security cameras and manage to get a genuine answer (that's the most difficult part), you'll figure out they are there just to convince Joe Public the government is doing something.
Finding useful clues from security footage is just plain serendipity.

space in harddrive is expensive and sometimes networks too.
I used to work on a company who install Sony IP security cameras.

most of the systems are servers with redundant hard drives and they are not cheap and cameras use a lot of space. you can set them to record under events but at streets they record all the time. The lower the resolution, the frames per second and the less light then less space is used on hard drive and bandwidth for transmission is lower .

if you want to send your video signal through wifi or other "air" network usually the bandwidth is limited.

there are some very good quality cameras for surveillance but they are not cheap

You'd be surprised how well forensic police can cipher crap video. I've done and seen it several hundred times. Also seeing what direction and where a suspect went can be just as useful as a clear picture of them.  On average nowadays many companies 'rent' cloud space in 3-5 week blocks.  The quality of the vid e.g o is dependent on the system used. Also by the time the news gets it, the video has often be converted a bunch of times which will lower the quality.